Because $0.005 per page is too much to pay I guess. Seriously, just fucking subscribe if you don't want to see the ads. It's cheap, the layout works better and you're not freeloading.
There is an international emergency number for GSM, which also works on landlines in Europe (and, if I read this Wikipedia article correctly, the USA) - 112.
The first emergency number was 999, in the UK. That was the first emergency number in use in the USA too. So, when the USA changes back to 999 rather than just being "different" for the sake of it you might have a point. Till then I suggest you shut the fuck up.
One reason I've heard for not doing it, from more than one sysadmin over the years, is that encrypted data is more susceptible to errors. In other words it's unreliable, not too hard to do. A couple of bad blocks on an unencrypted tape may lose you a file or two, but could render an encrypted tape unreadable. How true this is I have no idea, I'm a coder not a sysadmin, but it strikes me that encrypting individual files rather than entire tapes would solve this problem (though it would leak some information about file sizes etc.).
You tell someone on the phone your password. That person now knows your password.
The solution to that, which is implemented by more than one company I deal with, is to only validate a randomly selected subset of the password. "Can you confirm the third and fifth letters of your password please Sir." The person in the call centre doesn't know your entire password and an eavesdropper would need to listen to several calls to get the entire password. It's not perfect, but it requires no physical device (which anything good enough to satisfy a cryptographer surely would) and regular people can generally manage to do it just fine.
Good job Windows and Mac OS X (and the rest no doubt, but perhaps with some tinkering) can defer or warn about shutdown if there's a local user then, eh? If they're frequently used remotely (which is atypical in most places) then leave them on, but that doesn't apply to most machines in most places.
As for using another physical NFS server to solve large files filling up/home, what's wrong with quotas, partitions, ZFS...
There's an international power market. The French (among others) sell their excesses of relatively clean energy to dirtier countries like us (I'm British). What the French don't use we can use in preference to our on-average dirtier sources of power. I guess if the GP was from Iceland where virtually all electricity comes from renewables and they don't (yet) export it you'd have a point as far as CO2 goes, but CO2 emissions aren't the only environmental impact of electricity generation, even if they are the most pressing one.
As for nuclear power, I'm all for it. It's the best option we've got for base load as far as I can see. I just found the headline amusing (and yes, I do understand why people though it might have become a wildlife haven).
Hydro isn't only a base load supply, indeed I'm not sure it's used very much that way other than in countries where hydro is the dominant supply. Hydro is the fastest responding generation type we have, plants can be switched on and off in a couple of minutes. Not only that, but hydro is used in pump storage systems, storing excess energy generated at night by coal and nuclear plants and releasing it during the day.
If the base load reduced, of course the power companies are so stupid and their shareholders so generous that they'd not bother to change their supply mix, offer greater incentives to industry to use power at night or invest further in pump-storage systems.
But hibernate is just the same as powering off, only your HD gets a workout beforehand... So it actually ends up being worse for you than the already bad powering off and on.
Except with hibernate you save state, saving time in the morning. Ten minutes of time as you reboot and restart all your applications, reopen your files etc. has an energy cost in terms of lost productivity - you need more people, with the associated energy costs, to do the same amount of work.
Can you set the power-on time from within the OS on Wintel boxes? Having to set it from the BIOS screen, which generally you can't do remotely, would render it sufficiently inflexible as to be impractical for many organisations. Macs have the the advantage of their own platform with EFI, so you can set the startup/wake time from within the OS, with a script if you so desire. As it's the OS controlling the sleep/shutdown it knows if you're using the machine locally when the scheduled shutdown/sleep time comes and of course it stays on if you are. I don't know how it handles remote access, but being accessed remotely is not typical for most machines at most companies.
I agree absolutely that the price of energy should reflect the true cost, including the environmental impact. Till it does, those driven by short-sighted accounting or unenlightened self-interest won't change their behaviour. But I don't think looking after the environment is altruism, unless you happen to live on a different planet to this one. My concern for the planet is driven by enlightened self-interest - I and my descendants (so far) have no other planets on which to live.
Offtopic response: Blind shower grope? I'm having a bout of alopecia and as a result I currently have no eyebrows[1] and only one upper eyelash, not to mention that it looks an awful lot like I shaved a map of Ecuador into my pubes. So, my face is substantially worse than most people's at diverting water away from my eyes. When it rains, I get water in my eyes. I also look a bit like an alien, but that's just an aside. Despite this 'disability' I still have exactly zero trouble opening my eyes in the shower. Here's my hot tip: Rinse the soap/shampoo/jizz/whatever off your face.
[1] Actually, the bit in the middle above my nose hasn't fallen out. I tell people I shaved the rest as a protest against men plucking their monobrows into duobrows. I'm all mono and no brow, baby.
Ob. Cloverfield: If the "plot" is of the same standard as Lost, I'm going to burn every cinema in the city to minimise the chances of people even telling me about it.
You must be thinking of a different Apple to me. A few examples:
Mighty Mouse (right-click that requires you lift the other finger).
MacBook and (current) desktop keyboards - everybody else abandoned flat-top keys 25 years ago, because indentations provide useful tactile feedback. Without that feedback enabling you to centre you fingers on the keys without looking, touch typing is much harder. Even two-finger typing is harder.
Original iMac puck mouse, which provides no tacticle feedback about its orientation.
With Leopard's resolution independence it may not be a problem (I haven't tried Leopard yet), but without resolution independence spanning across monitors with different dpi just sucks. You can anchor one edge in the OS to match your physical configuration, but if the OS can't compensate for differences in dpi things will stretch and the mouse will jump as you go from monitor to monitor.
If an application can bring down the machine, then I don't want any part of that
Then whichever OS you use I suggest you configure it without swap, or with minimal swap, because the problem of applications using substantially more than the available RAM, causing the machine to thrash as it constantly swaps and thereby becoming so slow to respond that a reboot is the most expedient solution is far from unique to Mac OS X.
Not having legs? Erm, no. He has legs. Two of them, one on each side. I've seen them first-hand (when, incidentally, he came a distant last - it was over 400m and it was raining, apparently he can't do the bends in the wet very well). His legs were amputated below the knee, not at the butt.
I think the difference is what it's full of. In real life, the interesting stuff which is going on rarely fills your field of view; on TV most of the screen is usually pretty full of the interesting stuff.
So all those people driving trucks use them to haul around 3/4 of a ton on stuff? Yeah, just like all the people with SUVs use them to drive up the sides of mountains.
A recent study over there (GE) - done by respectable research bodies and ordered either by the government or the entity overseeing the atomic energy industry - has found an increase of children leukemia out of the average the closer the kids are living to an atomic power station.
I recall a study here in the UK which found something similar - but interestingly, they found similar clustering at proposed sites of nuclear power plants, not just operating ones, which suggests the geology which is good for building nuclear power plants is the cause, not the plants themselves.
Photoshop is written to Apple's proprietary APIs (I guess Cocoa for CS3 and Carbon before that), not any *nix APIs. Those APIs drive Apple's proprietary GUI code which you can only get for Mac OS, so the fact that Apple's proprietary APIs and GUI run on *nix doesn't really help the cause for porting Photoshop to Linux much at all. If Photoshop for the Mac was all POSIX and X11 you might have a point, but it isn't.
I expect there is third-party software for smartphones which will do that kind of thing. Just as an example, searching for series 60 timed profiles found Handy Profiles, which would seem to be a step in the right direction. That's the first valid hit on the first search I tried.
Wow, you can extrapolate a hell of a lot from zero data. When did I mention anything at all about my work environment? I was just curious about whether your obvious enthusiasm for breaking the work/life boundary (which isn't inherent to a device, of course) extended to your staff's work/life boundaries too.
As you seem so curious though: I have a smartphone of my own (more for fast data rather than email etc. on the device itself - tiny screens suck, my Nokia 770 is much nicer), which work can and do use to contact me, and that's fine by me. They only contact me outside work hours if it really can't wait. That's pretty rare and is usually a change in where I'll be working the next day or the offer of an extra days work (at overtime rates, of course) to cover for someone. If I don't find out till it's the next day and I'm already at the wrong site that's no big problem, so I can turn my phone off if I want to and there will be no repercussions. I do have one issue with my work's use of SMS though - my boss quite regularly uses txtspk. Ewww. I'm sure with T9 it's actually slower to type than proper English.
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Because $0.005 per page is too much to pay I guess. Seriously, just fucking subscribe if you don't want to see the ads. It's cheap, the layout works better and you're not freeloading.
There is an international emergency number for GSM, which also works on landlines in Europe (and, if I read this Wikipedia article correctly, the USA) - 112.
The first emergency number was 999, in the UK. That was the first emergency number in use in the USA too. So, when the USA changes back to 999 rather than just being "different" for the sake of it you might have a point. Till then I suggest you shut the fuck up.
One reason I've heard for not doing it, from more than one sysadmin over the years, is that encrypted data is more susceptible to errors. In other words it's unreliable, not too hard to do. A couple of bad blocks on an unencrypted tape may lose you a file or two, but could render an encrypted tape unreadable. How true this is I have no idea, I'm a coder not a sysadmin, but it strikes me that encrypting individual files rather than entire tapes would solve this problem (though it would leak some information about file sizes etc.).
The solution to that, which is implemented by more than one company I deal with, is to only validate a randomly selected subset of the password. "Can you confirm the third and fifth letters of your password please Sir." The person in the call centre doesn't know your entire password and an eavesdropper would need to listen to several calls to get the entire password. It's not perfect, but it requires no physical device (which anything good enough to satisfy a cryptographer surely would) and regular people can generally manage to do it just fine.
Good job Windows and Mac OS X (and the rest no doubt, but perhaps with some tinkering) can defer or warn about shutdown if there's a local user then, eh? If they're frequently used remotely (which is atypical in most places) then leave them on, but that doesn't apply to most machines in most places.
/home, what's wrong with quotas, partitions, ZFS...
As for using another physical NFS server to solve large files filling up
There's an international power market. The French (among others) sell their excesses of relatively clean energy to dirtier countries like us (I'm British). What the French don't use we can use in preference to our on-average dirtier sources of power. I guess if the GP was from Iceland where virtually all electricity comes from renewables and they don't (yet) export it you'd have a point as far as CO2 goes, but CO2 emissions aren't the only environmental impact of electricity generation, even if they are the most pressing one.
As for nuclear power, I'm all for it. It's the best option we've got for base load as far as I can see. I just found the headline amusing (and yes, I do understand why people though it might have become a wildlife haven).
Hydro isn't only a base load supply, indeed I'm not sure it's used very much that way other than in countries where hydro is the dominant supply. Hydro is the fastest responding generation type we have, plants can be switched on and off in a couple of minutes. Not only that, but hydro is used in pump storage systems, storing excess energy generated at night by coal and nuclear plants and releasing it during the day.
If the base load reduced, of course the power companies are so stupid and their shareholders so generous that they'd not bother to change their supply mix, offer greater incentives to industry to use power at night or invest further in pump-storage systems.
Except with hibernate you save state, saving time in the morning. Ten minutes of time as you reboot and restart all your applications, reopen your files etc. has an energy cost in terms of lost productivity - you need more people, with the associated energy costs, to do the same amount of work.
Can you set the power-on time from within the OS on Wintel boxes? Having to set it from the BIOS screen, which generally you can't do remotely, would render it sufficiently inflexible as to be impractical for many organisations. Macs have the the advantage of their own platform with EFI, so you can set the startup/wake time from within the OS, with a script if you so desire. As it's the OS controlling the sleep/shutdown it knows if you're using the machine locally when the scheduled shutdown/sleep time comes and of course it stays on if you are. I don't know how it handles remote access, but being accessed remotely is not typical for most machines at most companies.
I agree absolutely that the price of energy should reflect the true cost, including the environmental impact. Till it does, those driven by short-sighted accounting or unenlightened self-interest won't change their behaviour. But I don't think looking after the environment is altruism, unless you happen to live on a different planet to this one. My concern for the planet is driven by enlightened self-interest - I and my descendants (so far) have no other planets on which to live.
Reducing energy consumption isn't just about saving money, it's about not fucking up the planet too.
Offtopic response: Blind shower grope? I'm having a bout of alopecia and as a result I currently have no eyebrows[1] and only one upper eyelash, not to mention that it looks an awful lot like I shaved a map of Ecuador into my pubes. So, my face is substantially worse than most people's at diverting water away from my eyes. When it rains, I get water in my eyes. I also look a bit like an alien, but that's just an aside. Despite this 'disability' I still have exactly zero trouble opening my eyes in the shower. Here's my hot tip: Rinse the soap/shampoo/jizz/whatever off your face.
[1] Actually, the bit in the middle above my nose hasn't fallen out. I tell people I shaved the rest as a protest against men plucking their monobrows into duobrows. I'm all mono and no brow, baby.
Ob. Cloverfield: If the "plot" is of the same standard as Lost, I'm going to burn every cinema in the city to minimise the chances of people even telling me about it.
You must be thinking of a different Apple to me. A few examples:
With Leopard's resolution independence it may not be a problem (I haven't tried Leopard yet), but without resolution independence spanning across monitors with different dpi just sucks. You can anchor one edge in the OS to match your physical configuration, but if the OS can't compensate for differences in dpi things will stretch and the mouse will jump as you go from monitor to monitor.
Then whichever OS you use I suggest you configure it without swap, or with minimal swap, because the problem of applications using substantially more than the available RAM, causing the machine to thrash as it constantly swaps and thereby becoming so slow to respond that a reboot is the most expedient solution is far from unique to Mac OS X.
Not having legs? Erm, no. He has legs. Two of them, one on each side. I've seen them first-hand (when, incidentally, he came a distant last - it was over 400m and it was raining, apparently he can't do the bends in the wet very well). His legs were amputated below the knee, not at the butt.
I think the difference is what it's full of. In real life, the interesting stuff which is going on rarely fills your field of view; on TV most of the screen is usually pretty full of the interesting stuff.
So all those people driving trucks use them to haul around 3/4 of a ton on stuff? Yeah, just like all the people with SUVs use them to drive up the sides of mountains.
The GP suggested reversing the order of portions, not pairs. Now, whether that distinction is enough to make the algorithm "good enough" I don't know.
I recall a study here in the UK which found something similar - but interestingly, they found similar clustering at proposed sites of nuclear power plants, not just operating ones, which suggests the geology which is good for building nuclear power plants is the cause, not the plants themselves.
So that just leaves the ones you don't suspect.
Photoshop is written to Apple's proprietary APIs (I guess Cocoa for CS3 and Carbon before that), not any *nix APIs. Those APIs drive Apple's proprietary GUI code which you can only get for Mac OS, so the fact that Apple's proprietary APIs and GUI run on *nix doesn't really help the cause for porting Photoshop to Linux much at all. If Photoshop for the Mac was all POSIX and X11 you might have a point, but it isn't.
I expect there is third-party software for smartphones which will do that kind of thing. Just as an example, searching for series 60 timed profiles found Handy Profiles, which would seem to be a step in the right direction. That's the first valid hit on the first search I tried.
Wow, you can extrapolate a hell of a lot from zero data. When did I mention anything at all about my work environment? I was just curious about whether your obvious enthusiasm for breaking the work/life boundary (which isn't inherent to a device, of course) extended to your staff's work/life boundaries too.
As you seem so curious though: I have a smartphone of my own (more for fast data rather than email etc. on the device itself - tiny screens suck, my Nokia 770 is much nicer), which work can and do use to contact me, and that's fine by me. They only contact me outside work hours if it really can't wait. That's pretty rare and is usually a change in where I'll be working the next day or the offer of an extra days work (at overtime rates, of course) to cover for someone. If I don't find out till it's the next day and I'm already at the wrong site that's no big problem, so I can turn my phone off if I want to and there will be no repercussions. I do have one issue with my work's use of SMS though - my boss quite regularly uses txtspk. Ewww. I'm sure with T9 it's actually slower to type than proper English.